


Into the Water

by Night-Mare (Aoife)



Category: Arthuriana - Fandom, Grail Lore, Neo-Pagan Scripture & Lore, The Apple and the Thorn - Emma Restall Orr & Walter William Melnyk
Genre: Affalon | Avalon, Caledfwlch | Calesvol | Excalibur, Chalice Well, Crossing Point between Fiction & Religion, Enaid Las, Gen, Glastonbury Holy Thorn, Graal | Holy Grail, Pseudo-History, Sacred Landscapes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-22
Updated: 2014-01-22
Packaged: 2018-01-09 13:30:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1146562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aoife/pseuds/Night-Mare
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I consider the blue glimmers, thinking about the tales woven out of the myths of this place ...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The spring runs, blood red for a long moment. It clears and I can almost see shimmers of blue glass worn smooth by the years in the bottom of the well, still visible though the surrounding rocks are thickly cloaked in iron oxide. I consider the blue glimmers, thinking about the tales woven out of the myths of this place. The cup of Enaid Las. Vivian and Eosaidh. It is a story that is a story yet more than a story and …

_sink into the waters with us_

The linen has long since disintegrated. Fragments carried away by larvae, baring the shattered relic to the incessant bubbling of the spring’s waters. Some pieces have been carried away into the marshes. Some remain lodged amongst the rocks of the well to be covered in its salts. One or two have end up as pretty prizes carried away by the birds.

And yet somehow the cup is still whole. Long ago Vivian took the sword into the marsh and it has once been lifted out. But it has long since been returned to it’s resting place near to the grail. For all that the cup’s pieces are spread over Affalon, the right person could reach into the waters and lift it out. And yet, no one has. No one will. The grail waits. The sword waits. Shattered and shrouded by the mists, they wait for the ones who can call them forth.


	2. Chapter 2

There’s an island that is still teetering within the fragile grasp of time, held lightly, balanced on one of the edges of the world where the mists and the marshes end and the land once began. For all that the land is more pervasive now, it is bound with a net of rhynes, a set of ever present and defined borders and pathways between then and now, there and here, found and lost.

She stitches the last stitch into the new scabbard, and steps into the oldest rhyne, into what is left of the marshes, and into the waters deep. When she steps back onto the coracle there is a sword hanging in the belt, low on her hip. Cheshire cat like, she smiles and walks out of the mists to search for the man who will be her champion, who will wear the sword slung around her hips. Once she has buckled the belt around his waist, with a chaste kiss, she will return to retrieve the other half of this mystery.

She sits beneath Eosaidh’s thorn, and watches the mists roll down the rhymes, singing a wordless lullaby as she waits, a haunting sound encompassing the entirety of what she holds in her hands. The graal. The cup of wood, of pottery, of metals, of blue glass. That has never been called forth till she calls it forth and drapes it in linen at once whole and long since fragmented into dust, into birds nests and larvae cases and the fertile soils of the levels.

And she waits, waits, _waits_.


End file.
